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In 1933 nine scholars from the University of Toronto and its affiliated colleges met to establish the Canadian Society of Biblical Studies (CSBS), which thus became the oldest academic society in Canada. This article examines the CSBS’s early history with a special focus on its purpose and intellectual stance. From there it moves to chart an impression of the Society’s current achievements, activities and intellectual character. This leads to a brief assessment of the challenges that face the CSBS in the future.

In this paper the authors trace very briefly the most consequential points of the history of Religious Studies at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. This history demonstrates that the structural location and the disciplinary horizon of Religious Studies are central factors in whether Religious Studies is a marginal, threatened endeavor or whether it has a central, thriving place within the family of social sciences in a larger, research-oriented university. The main advantages and disadvantages of a cross-departmental and multi-disciplinary Program in the Study of Religion are presented in the last part of the paper.

This article meditates on the ambiguity of the concept of 'history' in Christian thought and in the historiography of Christian origins. After exploring the ambiguity of 'history', using Jesus as the illustrative case in point, it is argued that 'history' is itself the result of a complex process of historical production, a production of the kind that renders history, especially histories of highly valued origins, into narrative representations of believed-in imaginings, into mythographies that are nevertheless taken to be histories. Recognizing that history is fictioned to serve interests in the present turns history always into 'our' history, and recognizing, too, that this history is imagined to be history as it really was and the only history there can be- in effect turning the past into a simulacrum3/4. exposes 'history' as a mechanism for rationalising wordviews, social constitutions, and cultural preferences. Intellectually and morally, it exposes the fact that 'doing history' is never an innocent doing.

Citizens of ancient Greece and Rome were expected to reproduce, whereas violators of this guideline were penalized by governmental legislation. An exception was made for the Vestal Virgins and the eunuch‐priests of the Cybele cult because of their religious office. The obligation to reproduce hides a cultural conviction that sexual pleasure was potentially dangerous and antisocial because orgasm was associated with epilepsy and loss of vital spirit.